As the first artifacts of the working group, we are happy to announce a whitepaper and landscape to bring some clarity to this early and evolving technology space. The CNCF Serverless WG is also working on a draft specification for describing event data in a common way to ease event declaration and delivery, focused on the serverless space. The goal is to eventually present this project to the CNCF TOC to formalize it as an official CNCF project:

We’re still early days, but in my opinion, serverless is one application/programming built on cloud native technology. There are some open source efforts out there for serverless but they tend to be focused on specific projects (e.g., OpenFaaS, kubeless) versus collaboration across cloud providers and startups. The CNCF is looking to enable collaboration/projects in this space that adhere to our values. What are our values? See these from our charter:

Fast is better than slow. The foundation enables projects to progress at high velocity to support aggressive adoption by users.

Open. The foundation is open and accessible, and operates independently of specific partisan interests. The foundation accepts all contributors based on the merit of their contributions, and the foundation’s technology must be available to all according to open source values. The technical community and its decisions shall be transparent.

Strong technical identity. The foundation will achieve and maintain a high degree of its own technical identify that is shared across the projects.

Clear boundaries. The foundation shall establish clear goals, and in some cases, what the non-goals of the foundation are to allow projects to effectively co-exist, and to help the ecosystem understand where to focus for new innovation.

Scalable. Ability to support all scales of deployment, from small developer centric environments to the scale of enterprises and service providers. This implies that in some deployments some optional components may not be deployed, but the overall design and architecture should still be applicable.

Platform agnostic. The specifications developed will not be platform specific such that they can be implemented on a variety of architectures and operating systems.

Anyways, if you’re interested in this space, I highly recommend you attend the CNCF Serverless WG meetings which are public and currently happen on a weekly basis.